Look Beyond Your Four Walls
The Future of Entertainment Depends on It
by Barry Zelickson
One of the biggest mistakes an entertainment operator can make is believing their competition is limited to businesses that look exactly like theirs. It isn’t.
Your competition is anywhere people can choose to spend their time. It’s restaurants. It’s bars. It’s immersive art installations. It’s boutique hospitality concepts. It’s mini-golf reinvented as theater. It’s bowling reinvented as nightlife. It’s anywhere that creates a reason to leave home.
This month on Fun Across America, we visited two very different facilities: The Painted Duck in Atlanta, Georgia, and Albatross Indoor Golf Club in Edison, New Jersey. One is a hospitality-driven social gaming lounge. The other is the largest indoor themed mini-golf experience in the world.
They are different in execution, scale and style. But they share something far more important. Both are examples of operators who clearly looked beyond their own category, borrowed ideas from other industries, and adapted them to create something more relevant, more engaging and more resilient.
That mindset is what separates businesses that survive from those that evolve.
The Painted Duck — Atlanta, GA
When you walk into The Painted Duck, you immediately realize this isn’t just a bowling venue. In fact, bowling may not even be the most important thing here. What Painted Hospitality has done – brilliantly – is study the playbook of high-end restaurants, boutique hotels and cocktail lounges and apply those lessons to a social gaming environment. The lighting is intentional. The textures are layered. The space feels discovered, not advertised. It creates curiosity, comfort and emotional connection before a single game begins.
Most importantly, the activities are accessible. Duckpin bowling, shuffleboard, air hockey and Belgian feather bowling are easy to understand and quick to engage. There is no barrier to entry, no intimidation factor. This mirrors what great hospitality venues understand: the experience must invite participation, not demand expertise. But perhaps the most transferable lesson is their commitment to food and beverage.
Too many entertainment venues still treat food as a support function. Painted Duck treats it as a core pillar. Their menu, presentation and quality would stand on their own in a successful restaurant. That decision fundamentally changes guest behavior. People stay longer. They order more. They return more often.
This is what happens when operators look outside their category and apply hospitality standards instead of entertainment standards. They elevate the entire experience.
Albatross — Edison, N.J.
Where Painted Duck learned from hospitality, Albatross clearly learned from immersive entertainment, video games and theatrical design. This is not traditional mini golf. It is narrative-driven, sensory-rich and emotionally engaging. Every hole is designed to create a moment. A purple Lamborghini on the red carpet. A roulette wheel that can double or erase your score. A nightclub scene where music and lighting respond to your success.
These elements are not accidental. They reflect principles used in video game design, escape rooms and immersive theater: risk and reward, environmental storytelling and emotional payoff. Even the scoring system creates tension and engagement beyond simple putting skill. Guests make choices. They take risks. They celebrate wins and laugh at losses. They become participants, not just customers.
Albatross demonstrates what happens when operators stop asking, “How do we build a better mini-golf course?” and start asking, “How do we build a more engaging experience?” That shift in thinking opens entirely new possibilities. The real lesson: Your future is being invented somewhere else.
The most important takeaway from both Painted Duck and Albatross is not their bowling, mini-golf or their design. It’s their curiosity. Both operators clearly studied experiences outside their immediate category. They borrowed from hospitality, nightlife, immersive entertainment and game design. Then, they adapted those ideas to fit their own identity and audience.This is how innovation actually happens in our industry. Not by copying competitors, but by learning from entirely different types of businesses. The operators who thrive in the coming decade will be the ones who constantly ask:
• What are restaurants doing better than us?
• What are immersive experiences doing better than us?
• What are hotels doing better than us?
• What are video games doing better than us?
• What are our guests experiencing elsewhere that they now expect everywhere?
Because whether we acknowledge it or not, every great experience a guest has anywhere raises their expectations everywhere. Standing still is not neutral. It is falling behind. Entertainment has never been more competitive. Guests have more options than ever, and their expectations continue to rise.
Facilities that rely solely on what worked five or 10 years ago will slowly lose relevance, not because they failed, but because the world around them continued to evolve. Painted Duck and Albatross are reminders that evolution does not require abandoning your identity. It requires expanding your perspective.
Look beyond your four walls. Study other industries. Learn from different types of experiences. Adapt what works. Discard what doesn’t. Continue refining. Because the future of entertainment will not be defined by those who protect the past. It will be defined by those who learn from everything around them.
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Fun Across America is made possible thanks to our partners Rhode Island Novelty, Roller and Semnox. Please check out these great companies as they will have a solution for what you need. Do you know a facility that deserves a spotlight? Reach out — we’re always looking for our next adventure. Until next time, keep having FUN — across America!
Barry Zelickson, is the co-creator of Fun Across America, a YouTube channel travelogue show. Zelickson has worked in the entertainment field for almost 30 years and has been awarded several IAAPA Brass Ring awards including one of the association’s highest honors, Family Entertainment Center of the World. His other projects include commercials, infomercials, feature films, documentaries, live events and entertainment centers.
Nate Reinhart, host and co-creator of Fun Across America, is a content creator for NalterDeeds and NalterCards on YouTube and content consultant for creators and businesses alike. After a shoutout from MrBeast, Nate has accumulated over 250,000 subscribers on his YouTube channels.